


Broken Window

by cognomen



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-26
Updated: 2014-03-26
Packaged: 2018-01-17 02:30:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1370602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Happy 44th birthday, Constantine. If slightly belated.</p></blockquote>





	Broken Window

Constantine wrecked the car.

"What are you doing to me," he said, looking up, the world a momentary freeze in the instant before. He was talking to me, outside the bounds of the lined page. Me.

"I'm sorry," I answered, but my tone doesn't do much to convey that. "I'm using you as a parable."

Constantine scoffs. He was tall because I wasn't. He was blonde, with eyes that changed color and I was neither. He was big and solid, sturdy and able to weather most storms with full control of his heart because I didn't possess any of those traits.

"Yeah," he continued, standing outside the car now. "But why me?"

"Because the last time I endured this, you were more important in my life. Because I know how these emotions relate to you and to your story," I answered, realizing that this was a cheap trick. That this was all a cheap trick in transference of emotion. 

"I'm sorry," I concluded. This time, I meant it. He had been set aside, rarely thought about. Constantine was a crutch I had used when I had forgotten how to walk and set aside when I was on my feet.

I was only thinking of him now because I'd stumbled.

"Well," he said, and his vowels stretched in the familiar Chicago accent as he looked back toward the car. The sounds were long, sharp with city hardened sarcasm. "That's alright. I'm used to it."

He stuffed his hands into his back pockets, and rolled his head on the tether of his neck, looking down at the instant before utter calamity the same way I could always look, when translating emotion to page. 

"Are you gonna kill me?" he asked, and it didn't sound concerned. 

"I don't know what I'd do without you," I answered. "If I need you now, I'm sure I'll need you again."

He climbed back in the car, as I thought about this cheap trick in narration, as I thought man someday everyone will realize what a hack I am, how much I copy before I realized that everyone copied. Humans copy from the second they are born and find something appealing in the sound of Mummy's voice to the instant they die, thinking 'it couldn't happen to me'. 

So what then if I copied a little. 

"Hey," I told him, as he closed his hands around the wheel, seeing the tension through the locked elbows, the resigned expression. "Trust me."

He doesn't.

Constantine wrecked the car in a splendor of average twisting metal and jolting frame. He did not flip it or spin it or turn sixteen times in the air going over a cliff, but he did allow a moment of supreme distraction to carry him and the car both over the jarring jolts of the curb, narrowly past the first light pole but unable to avoid the second. 

He had missed the turn because of the sudden change of angle of his own head, and then his own supreme disbelief had carried him further than the initial failure of attention and onward straight into overload. 

He found his attention was easier to distract as he got older, and now there was that stretch of time between loss and renewal when his thoughts tied themselves in knots anyway. 

Reflecting, as he sat dazed and feeling the onset tightness of whiplash, the way his chest was contracted by the tightly locked seat belt, he knew he could not have seen what he thought, but he couldn't, either, kill the hope within himself.

What the hell, he figured, jammed his thumb - bleeding from something, glass maybe - against the red button release of the seat belt, and leaned his weight into the door until it groaned open on shrieking hinges. If he had imagined the whole thing - and he had he told himself, in an effort to stub out unfolding hope - he could blame looking for it anyway on hitting his head in the wreck.

Already people were gathering, and Constantine rotated slowly on his heel, afraid to get too far from the car and collapse.

What he had seen, or what he had thought he had seen, in this godforsaken hellhole of a city that he hated more and more the longer he spent here, was his old partner.

Why he knew he hadn't seen David was because he had seen the man die four years ago in a hospital. A lot of shit had happened since then, but in all of it he'd never seen a ghost as clearly as this one.

None of the faces watching him were familiar but ahead on the street, he caught just a glimpse of dark hair rounding a corner.

Constantine hadn't dreamed in years, and he had gotten sloppy. It was only by chance that he knew where his totem was, clawing the battered deck of cards out of the glove compartment of the car, yanking the keys from the ignition, and jamming both into his pocket.

His knees gave no sign of abandoning him for weakness, though his head ached, his heart ached. 

"I don't see how this is a parable," he told me, jogging up the street. "This is nothing to do with your situation."

"My situation is that I want to be happy," I answered. "Vicariously, if I can make you happy..."

"And you think this is the answer?" he spat, but he jogged after the retreating figure anyway. I heard him, of course. "Raising the dead?"

"That's not quite what I'm doing," I was defensive. I was overly defensive these days. "Your whole world is about redefining reality to suit you. In fact, it's about redefining what reality is, altering it to become the perception of which that you most need to survive and move forward, as a being."

I wasn't sure that made sense to him. He reached the corner, and rounded it.

"So this is what - fantasizing?"

"Wishful thinking," I allowed. 

"David!" he shouted, and this time there was no question who he was talking to. 

The man didn't turn or give any sign of recognition, enough that Constantine doubted the whole thing. He heard sirens, knew that he should get back to the car before he was accused of leaving the scene of an accident, even if the only thing he had smashed up was himself.

But if there was any silhouette he recognized from the back, if there were any curls of hair he'd know better at a fifty foot distance on a street, after a glance from a moving vehicle, it was these.

"David!" he tried again, nothing. 

He turned to go back to the car.

"Hey," I interjected. "You're giving up."

"You gave up," he answered. "You always give up. You're the one always making sacrifices. So I'm doing what you expect me to do."

"But that's not what you do," I answered, and then I realized I had betrayed him by way of leaving his life vague from last known point to this one. What had happened to him since I'd left him splitting apart and kidnaped and now, where he was living in Paris and wandering the town that all the rest of the world seemed to have abandoned like a ghost. 

"Nah," he said, standing at the car. "It's what I did with a lot of things. I stood up, I faced what was coming, and then made the decision to step over it." 

Then the police had spotted him, and he was making hasty apologies in his terrible French, explaining that he had confused himself in the wreck, that he was sorry.

Five days later, I brought him back to the same spot.

"What am I doing here," he asked, as much to himself as me, I suspected. 

"I want you to show me how you do it," I asked, trying not to sound desperate or pathetic. "Tell me what you did to stop caring about Fischer when he didn't need you anymore, or whatever it was that happened between you. Tell me how you picked yourself up after David and moved on."

Today, Constantine was walking the dog - an inherited Husky named Tarragon, the relic of a dead CIA partner, but not the one I was referring to. 

The dog sniffed the sidewalk and lifted her heels high but did not pull the leash. She was getting older. He was, too. 

"I turned forty four yesterday you know," he told me, conversationally.

"I didn't forget," I said. "I didn't forget David's death either, though I almost did."

"You did," he reminded. "You remembered an hour after the day ended."

"I was in a better place then," I said, sighing, apologetic.

"Alright," he said. "But I can't see how I can tell you anything at all since you're behind the whole thing. Anything I say is translated into reality by you in the first place."

He was always too smart. There are times I regretted that. Looking back sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't have held it back, but it was a part of him now.

"When David died, I only barely picked myself up," he continued anyway. "You know that. You wrote the whole fiasco. At the time it was a parable, In my opinion, for how you couldn't let go of the one before all that. You wrote it as a tribute to finally letting go of that ten years of your life you go back and forth between loving and hating."

His ribs were sore from the bruise left by the seat belt, his neck tender in places, his was still tight. Otherwise, he was unharmed. I had kept my word.

"Okay," I said.

"You were only letting go at that point because you thought you were moving on. You had someone new that made letting go worthwhile. Someone you could talk to that you weren't in the process of letting go," Constantine continued, lighting a cigarette when Tarragon paused to pee on the rural bushes. His eyes stay away from the bent light pole.

"This time, you don't have that. So you're trying to make a parable again, trying to find that ease you had in letting go - in fact you had that same ease the second time. When you took up a painter," he eyed me, or rather, he tossed a sour glance in any direction, knowing I would know who it was for.

"This time you're trying to repeat the past."

"Hey," I said, realizing we were off track. "We aren't talking about me!"  
"Aren't we?" he asked, but his head was turning. He'd caught sight of that same familiar figure, that distracting silhouette, passing along the sidewalk.

This time, he can see that it is David. I was bribing him.

Constantine parked the cigarette between his lips, balancing it between loosely opened teeth and jammed a hand into his pocket, wincing, pulling out the taped together card box and rifling through the deck. The card that came up on top was a genuine four of clubs, battered and worn soft from it's time in David's wallet. 

Beneath it was a card that had once been a Joker, with the same title written in the top. 

Reality, and the replacement for reality. 

"What's the trick," Constantine asked. "Why didn't he answer when I called after him last time."

"He doesn't remember," I said. 

"Then what the fuck is this," he demanded. "What does it matter if he doesn't remember me or shit-all?"

"You're saying if given a second chance, you wouldn't take it?" I asked.

"Why should I? Look," he said. "I don't know this man. To me, who is now an outside-fuckin'-observer, he looks perfectly content. Should I walk up to him and go 'hey you don't remember me but I had the biggest stiffy for you when we were both in the CIA jamming plugs in our brain and dreaming ourselves to death."

I tried to think about this in context to me, in context to my situation currently.

"Apples and oranges again," he reminded me. "You're trying to apply the past to the present. This is a new situation. You ain't been abandoned this time, though you're sure as hell doing the best you can to get yourself that way."

I didn't argue.

"How I do it is how you do it," he told me, and turned on his heel in the street, taking the dog back the way he came. "I get angry for a while, I retreat, I give up everything because while I can tell myself that's what's best for everyone, that it's the best path because then I'm not in the way, really what I mean is that it's the easiest."

"Self denial and isolation is the easiest," he repeated. "But all it gets you is forgot. Like you do with me. Someone will open up the story they made with you and think back fondly on who you were then without knowing who you are now. Because you just go away."

He wasn't wrong.

"So don't do what I do," he continued.

"Hey," I said. "Stop."

He stopped. Smoke came out of his lungs on his breath.

"But the past is relevant here. I want to correct the mistake I made the first time I tried to heal, so I need you to be my parable for crossing the bridge back into involvement."

"Oh yeah?" He said. "You need that?"

"I need you. I need that from you."

"Well," he said, dropping the cigarette, looking both ways up the street. David hasn't gone too far ahead. "I'll make you a deal. You stop punishing yourself through denial - I saw you laying on the floor today and telling yourself that was what you deserved. I'll go through this."

"So... you'll be involved if I'll be involved," I answered, and it felt like a lead weight anyway, not the freedom I was hoping for, but somehow right.

"Bingo," he said. "And I wouldn't mind if you fixed up my life a little more. I see what you're doing with Boxers and Painters, Fencers and whatever else. You're creative. Just remember if I'm your parable, you gotta fix me up just like you gotta fix yourself up."

"It's a deal."

When he was sure there were no cars coming, Constantine crouched by the dog, pointed out the retreating figure, and loosed the leash, sending Tarragon bounding up the sidewalk after David in a clear ploy for attention, a decision to make an opportunity. 

"Hey," I called after. "Thanks."

**Author's Note:**

> Happy 44th birthday, Constantine. If slightly belated.


End file.
